Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Ranked Choice Voting

Starting point is 00:00:00 All around the world, more jurisdictions are implementing a voting system known as ranked choice voting. Ranked choice voting is very different from voting for a single candidate. As such, many people who have been voting for years don't understand how ranked choice voting works or why it's being implemented. Learn more about ranked choice voting, how it works, and its drawbacks and benefits on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:39 ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to us. uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the Thuline podcast from NPR. Before I get into the details of ranked choice voting, I first have to back up to explain a major problem with all voting systems. The problem is this.

Starting point is 00:01:12 It is literally impossible to implement a voting system that all. always will reflect the general will of the electorate. This isn't just my opinion. It is actually a mathematical proof. In fact, the man who came up with this proof, Kenneth Arrow of Stanford University, was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on voting systems. Without getting into the mathematics, the implication is that the voting system you use can result in different outcomes,

Starting point is 00:01:40 even if the preferences of the electorate don't change. To understand why this is the case, it's easiest to understand it by providing some hypotheticals. For starters, voting is not transitive. In mathematics, if A is greater than B and B is greater than C, then A must be greater than C. However, voting doesn't work that way. If candidate A is preferred to candidate B and candidate B is preferred to candidate C, it does not necessarily follow that candidate A is preferred over candidate C.

Starting point is 00:02:12 The situation could be something more akin to rock paper, scissors. If you have an election with just two options, then there really isn't a problem. Everyone votes for one option or the other, and whatever gets the majority of votes will win. Problems come into play when you have more than two options. Let's suppose you have an electorate that is generally split 60-40. However, the 60% in the majority split their support between two different candidates. If you have a first-past-the-post election system where whoever gets the most votes wins, the two candidates that represent the majority would split the vote and get 30% of the vote each. The person who represents the minority, but doesn't have someone from their

Starting point is 00:02:52 side splitting the vote, will get 40% of the ballot. In such a situation, the person with 40% of the vote would win, even though the majority of the voters don't want that person to win. The more options you have in the ballot, the worse the situation gets. While Kenneth Arrow formally stated the problem and gave it a mathematical underpinning, he was hardly the first person to realize that there was a problem with voting systems. There has been a series of attempts at voting reforms going back for centuries to try to find something better than first past the post, winner-take-all systems. There were early experimentations with voting systems in 13th century Catalonia. This system was a series of two-way elections between candidates, not quite a ranked choice system. In the 15th

Starting point is 00:03:37 century in Germany, there were experiments with a system known as the board account. The board account was discovered multiple times in multiple places, and it's basically a system where you award points to various candidates. It gets its name from Jean-Charles de Bordea, a French mathematician who published his system in 1781. In the board account system, if you have four candidates, you would award three points to one candidate, two points to another candidate, and one to still another. Zero points would be awarded for the fourth candidate, and any candidate who didn't receive a vote would also get zero. Another system known as the single transferable vote was designed in Denmark in the 19th century. An American Unitarian Minister named Robert Ware developed a variant of the single transferable vote called instant runoff voting. The first place to actually implement any sort of ranked choice voting was Tasmania, Australia, in 1890,

Starting point is 00:04:27 and it was implemented in other parts of Australia in the early 20th century. This system spread to a few cities in Ireland and South Africa in the 1920s, and then to some cities in Canada and the United States afterwards. There has been a resurgence in the popularity of ranked voting over the last several years. There have been several jurisdictions that have adopted a ranked choice voting as their way of resolving elections. This includes states, municipalities, and even some associations. So, what exactly is ranked choice voting? Ranked choice voting is where you rank all of the candidates presented to you instead of just voting for the one person you want to win.

Starting point is 00:05:02 So let's take a simple hypothetical election with three candidates, A, B, and C. In such an election, there are six possible preferences. A, B-C, ACB, B-A-B-C-A, C-A-B-C-A, C-A-B, C-B-A. When the ballots are tallied, the first thing which is looked at are the number of ballots which a candidate was ranked number one. The election is over if one candidate receives more than 50% of the top ranks. However, if no candidate is ranked first on 50% of the ballots, then you have to move to the next round. In round two, the candidate with the lowest number of first preferences is eliminated. On any ballot, they were ranked number one.

Starting point is 00:05:45 The top rank is now transferred to whoever was ranked number two. In this example, there would now only be two candidates left after round two, and one of the two would have to have the majority. If there were more candidates than three, you would just iterate this process over and over until there was just one candidate that had the majority of top ranks. So what is the point of this system of voting? For starters, it works much better in a system where many candidates are running in a single election. For example, you might have over a dozen candidates in a single primary.

Starting point is 00:06:18 The top vote getter may only be listed number one on 30% of the ballots or less, meaning that 70% of the people voting actually wanted someone else. When you have so many candidates, it's a way for people to still have their preferences count, even if their number one candidate doesn't win. The second benefit is that it has a tendency to reduce extremism. You aren't just ranking who you like, but you're also ranking low the candidates that you don't like. It's entirely possible under the system of voting

Starting point is 00:06:47 that somebody could win who wasn't the first choice of very many people, but they also weren't ranked last by very many people. The winner of the election could be the person who was just acceptable to the largest number. The other major benefit is that it opens up elections to third-party candidates. In a two-party system, like in the United States, many people are reluctant to vote for a third party because their odds of winning are low. And you've probably heard of people saying that if you vote for someone in a third party, you are wasting your vote.

Starting point is 00:07:15 However, your vote isn't all or nothing in a ranked choice voting system. You could still vote for a major party candidate first and then vote for a third-party candidate second. As I just mentioned, if somebody is just acceptable to the largest number of people, that might be enough to win. So what is the downside to this system? For starters, it is more confusing and complicated than a regular first-past-the-post voting. First-past-the-post voting is very simple. You vote for one person, and the person who gets the most votes wins. Yes, it doesn't reflect a wide range of preferences like in a multi-candidate race, but it's simple to understand.

Starting point is 00:07:52 The other downside is that you can't necessarily get election results as quickly. If all you're doing is counting ballots, then it doesn't take much time to declare a winner. But with ranked choice voting, running all the iterations could take a day or two. Moreover, it pretty much has to be done with a computer, as doing it by hand would be even more time-consuming. The other big downside is the potential violation of keeping vote secret. The number of potential ways to rank candidates is finite and gets larger the more candidates that run. For example, in the 2021 New York mayoral primary, there were 14 candidates on the ballot. That means that there were over 87 billion different ways to rank the candidates.

Starting point is 00:08:33 That number is much higher than the number of people who actually cast ballots. And that means there will probably be a lot of ballots that have a unique ranking. And it could, at least theoretically, be possible to tie an individual ballot to the person who cast it. As of right now, rank choice voting is still only used in a handful of locations. It's used quite heavily in Australia, and it's used in Ireland, Slovenia, Nauru, Malta, and some parts of the United Kingdom. In the United States, it's been fully adopted on the state level in only two states, Maine and Alaska. Other than that, it's just been adopted at the city level in places like New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, as well as a handful of smaller towns.

Starting point is 00:09:14 Both supporters and detractors of rank choice voting have come from both sides of the political aisle. Australians seem to like using it, and they've been using it for decades. It isn't known how widespread ranked choice voting will eventually become. Many jurisdictions are still experimenting with it, and many of the places which have tried it, have abandoned it. But if you should encounter rank choice voting somewhere where you live, hopefully now you'll have a better understanding of what it is and how it works. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett.

Starting point is 00:09:52 I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over and at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays. Remember, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you too can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Ranked Choice Voting

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